Are Asians The Most Favored Race In Online Dating?

In their latest trends report, OkCupid said it best when they said American race relations suck.

We're all aware of racial stereotyping and how it can unfortunately hinder our dating opportunities. But what if we didn't live in a predominantly white society? What if there were fewer white people? Would all racial bias disappear? OkCupid sums up the answer in one word: asians.

In the past couple of months, OkCupid has formulated a data set based on 82 million messages sent by their users to differentiate racial popularity from population. And what they eventually found was that if all races were equally represented in the population, asians would be the most desired race.

Presently, white users receive the most messages, averaging about 12 a month and almost 90% of white users message other white users. However, asians, latinos and blacks also predominantly message white users with asians sending whites 71% of their messages. However, according to the report, whites outnumber asians 19:1 with 74% of users being white and 4% being asian.

And if populations ratios were to level out, then the average monthly messages received by white people would go down while it would go up for latinos, asians, and blacks, with asians receiving the majority of messages. In the chance that asians became the predominant race, 74% of white senders would send to asians, with 98% of asians, 71% of latinos and 66% of blacks doing the same. So, at least in online dating, is race relations just a numbers game?

Well, not exactly: at the end of the study, OkCupid explored how races write to each other and to those of a different race. They found the average black user will "write up" (a full grade-level higher than average) .5% when the recipient is asian and .3% when the recipient is white. A latino user will "write down" (a full grade-level lower than average) .6% when the recipient is black, but will "write up" .5% when the recipient is asian. Across the board, users "write down" when the recipients are black and latino but write up for asians and whites.